Sharing Our Innermost Thoughts

I frequently think back to when someone whom I originally met online and am still friends with would often be bullied in school and have mental breakdowns over it; I shall address this person by ‘Callum’ in this post. As far as I’m aware, this went on from 2015 to around 2017, and I started regularly talking to him in 2015. While we enjoyed each other’s company, my personality back then wasn’t great; I wouldn’t say I was a bad person at all, but I was relatively insensitive, pushy and not very open to new things. I was even relatively edgy and into facetious, crude stuff, because ‘That’s how the cool kids in my own school act,’ I thought, and back then I tried way too hard to fit in in those kids’ group even though I didn’t fit in properly at all. That’s another thing: the effort I put into trying to fit in with those classmates of mine should have been put into strengthening the bond I had with Callum – I mean, Callum and I had the same main interest and had a handful of other interests in common, which my classmates and I did not, and he was certainly a more genuine and caring person than they were; but no, I was 14-15 and stupid so I thought it better to try and become closer to my classmates who would literally make me feel inferior to them (I tended to be the butt of their jokes; mind you, there were times when I had that coming, because again, my personality back then wasn’t great, but I digress). More often than not, I would bug Callum to get into that facetious, crude stuff I watched and whichever dumb vines my classmates were into at the time, even though he would say that sort of thing wasn’t his cup of tea at all, and I just didn’t give as much regard to the issues he was going through as I think I should have. I desperately wish I could redo the past five and a half years of my life, so that I could have been there for Callum more and better with regards to what he was going through at the time, could have been more open to exploring some of the things which he was interested in but I wasn’t, and could have been more willing to be a bit silly and goofy in demeanour like he would be – but now it’s way too late.

Whenever I think about the bullying that Callum dealt with back then, it genuinely really saddens me. He lives in the UK, so every time I’m watching TV and I see kids in a British school environment with uniforms and all that – and to an extent, even when I see a video with British pre-teens or very young teenagers in it – I think of what Callum used to go through in school and less than five seconds later I think of how I could have been a better friend to him during that time but wasn’t, and it invariably hurts. Callum doesn’t seem to be hung up about this at all; he told me much more recently that he always really appreciated me and that me being so nice to him ultimately led him to come out of his shell like he did. Granted, it’s not as if I showed no sympathy for him over what he was going through in the ‘old days’, but needless to say, there was plenty of room for improvement in that regard.